A deal between Salesforce.com and Google makes sense from a PR perspective, with Microsoft planning to release its CRM tool as a hosted application, called Microsoft Dynamics CRM Live, at the end of the second quarter. Both Salesforce.com and Google would love to steal some thunder from Microsoft, one analyst said.

For all the mergers and acquisitions the business world has seen in the past month, Google and Salesforce.com are reminding Wall Street that strategic alliances are still in style.

According to a Monday article in the Wall Street Journal, the two Internet companies are in talks about a partnership that would target Microsoft . The paper cited unnamed sources that claim the companies are working out details of a possible alliance that might be revealed within weeks.